America ReFramed

children chattering, giggling

I saw myself as white because my parents are white. You reflect yourself in them. And then I realized, "I'm not white." And it was so strange because I knew I was Korean. I knew I was adopted all my life, but this image was so strong. I even studied Korean at the university, so I was really aware of my origin, and still, I saw myself as white. When I mirrored myself and my sisters, they are also white because they are the children of my parents, and we are a white family. It's so strange. So that didn't really help me...

laughs

Having Asian sisters.

mysterious music

Throughout the 20th century, the demand for children to adopt has always been higher than supply. In the 1970s, it actually became acute, and so there was this thing that people were calling a white baby famine.

dramatic music

One of the reasons why there was a white baby famine is the legalization of abortion. You have more widespread use of birth control and, because of the women's rights movement, increased acceptance of single women being able to raise their own children. And you had an increasing activism around trans-racial adoption, and you had parents in the U.S. really expressing their beliefs in a kind of global humanity through adopting across racial lines. But by the early 1970s, the adoption of Black children into white families was highly politicized. Similar concerns are voiced by Native Americans, who say that white parents adopting Native American children is problematic for Native American sovereignty. One of the results was that Korean children became even more desirable. They are thought to be free of political baggage. There's no outcry from the Asian-American community. There's no resistance. And then on top of that, you have these emerging ideas of Asians as a model minority-- this idea that they can be racially flexible, good students, that they'll be good kids. The number of children leaving Korea was growing exponentially.